Maiku -- by Tonyellis

The seed was sown when I was eleven years old; shiny-faced and burdened with hopes of excellence. A voracious reader, I picked up any book I saw and I imagine now a great army of them, all calling to me; offering to lead me in one direction or another. I don’t mean to say that I might have picked up, say, ‘Ten Years Before the Mast’ and automatically be led to a life at sea. Rather that they each contained a kind of hidden message that would help to form my Way of Being.

The book which was to have such a profound effect on my life was given to me by a school friend. It was You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming. In fact I read the whole series of the James Bond saga and remember little or nothing. My hidden message had absolutely nothing to do with the plot, forming as it did merely a part of the ‘background colour’ which authors use to display their well-traveledness or to fill in the gaps between one piece of thrilling action and another. What I found was the Haiku. I have no memory of the actual haikus I read in the book, only the form they took. Perhaps Bond encountered something like:

‘The butterfly appears in its own time.
As it dies.’

Thirteen syllables. Count them. Of course, the number of syllables is not the only criterion. It is, after all, a poem and should express some emotion or perceived truth, in layers of meaning. I suppose this aspect must have escaped me at the time, to judge by the only attempt after my first discovery:

‘I can’t fucking stand that fat maths teacher.
He’s a cunt.’

As is often the way with seeds, this one, once planted, lay dormant for many years. In fact I think it disappeared completely from my consciousness. The shoot appeared one day in an English Lit. seminar during my first year at an East London polytechnic. Structuralism had yet to reach us there and it was still common to discuss writers and their worlds as having only a vague connection to each other. This gave rise to essay titles such as “How much did the period in which Shakespeare lived influence his writing? Discuss.” My own opinion (well, one I’d read) was that while the form of a piece of writing may be influenced by individual talent, the content had everything to do with the historical moment. It was my turn to lead the seminar and, having recently become aware of the ‘Who Really Wrote Shakespeare’s Plays?’ debate, I opened with my punchy title: ‘Was it Shakespeare or Francis Bacon: Does it Matter?’ I paused, just as I had planned to; waiting for the confused reactions of my fellow students, the better to astound them with the brilliance of my argument. However the pause lengthened. Everyone else was waiting, but something poked at me from my subconscious. I tried to force myself to speak, but the poking continued, growing stronger and more insistent until at last I realised what I was doing. I was counting the syllables of my introduction. I ran it through my mind again, trying various rhythms and counting on my fingers. Thirteen. Having set the thought free, I was ready to continue, yet suddenly it seemed pointless to do so. I began to feel that, in those nine words, I had said all there was to say on the subject.

The tutor did not share this sentiment. A woman of some fifty years and a devoted slave to the writing of Shakespeare, she’d dealt with many would-be iconoclasts in her time. “Might we expect a few more words on the subject?’ she asked. I said nothing. The arguments I had so painstakingly prepared now seemed meaningless. Joan Butler stepped towards me and took my essay from my unresisting hands. I couldn’t hear the words as she read them and was only vaguely aware of the sarcasm dribbling from each one. When she began her harangue, I returned to the classroom. My classmates, scenting blood, joined the assault and I tasted briefly those feelings of humiliation and frustration peculiar to young people who have tried to be clever and lost. Yet, as I left the seminar, pointedly not speaking to anyone, some words echoed through my mind. A mission spoken boldly over a new rhythm:

‘I have infinity to write:
where’s my fucking pen?’
___________________________________________________

Anyone who has been to university or college will know that one of the most disagreeable aspects of daily life is the legion of poets waving their latest work under your nose and insisting that you read it and give your honest opinion. The content is usually along the lines of ‘I’m so sensitive and nobody understands me, God I wish I were dead’. There were, of course, exceptions, for example the ‘I love him/her but he/she treats me disgustingly. It’s not fair and I wish I were dead’ school or the ‘look what you rotten old bastards have done to the world with your wars and your prejudices: it’s about time we organised things for a change’ movement. The form tended to be stream of consciousness punctuated only by the occasional dotted line, in some cases dragged unwillingly along to a mawkish conclusion by rudimentary stabs at rhyme and metre.

The most persistent of these pests was Roger Moscrop. Roger was ‘an Aquarius’. I only knew this about him because of his habit of telling everybody he met. Having said that, he did seem to flow rather than walk. His long fair hair flowed as did his clothes; in fact the verb ‘flow’ would have done very nicely for just about all of his actions except for his poetry writing, which seemed to drip, gurgle and splatter. He flowed up to me one day when I was sitting in the refectory, alone as usual. After a term of having my lunch ruined by having to pore over endless pages of poems, offering the authors criticism wrapped in forced, false praise, I was keen to encourage brevity if nothing else. Particularly where Roger, a tireless champion of vers libre was concerned. So, having watched a metaphor stagger drunkenly between the Union Carbide accident and the spread of AIDS and stumbling occasionally over the expulsion from the garden of Eden while my shepherd’s pie grew cold, I scribbled quickly on a cigarette paper and handed it to the poet without a word:


“The Tiger kills, then eats and sleeps:
Nature cleans his plate”

He received this in the same silence.

Before long, I was writing haikus in my every spare moment. I bought a small notebook so that I could dedicate a page to each without wasting too much paper or marooning the poems in too much white space. My handwriting improved as I began to pay attention to the appearance of my work. The strategy of handing a page to people without a word of apology or explanation and then walking away without waiting for reactions created an aura of mystery around me and I did my best to encourage this by dressing in black. I became, if you’ll excuse the immodesty, interesting to those around me. I no longer sat alone in the refectory, a lonely flower victim for the poet drones.

Perhaps the most surprising friend I made during this time was Joan Butler. Though I would never have dared show her my haikus, her reverence for the sonnet made me feel that we had something in common. For Roger, any formal poetic structure was a prison which kept the light of creativity from its inmates. I think Joan was even more surprised than I was to hear me say that creativity could only be reached within the discipline of such structures. Shortly after I described Roger’s poems as ‘taxonomies of second-hand opinions and desires’, my essays began to receive B+ rather than the C I’d begin to feel was inevitable.


As my reputation grew among my fellow students, I decided it was time to face the rigours of official literary criticism, so I signed up for the creative writing society. Our writer in residence, Sally Greentree, was making a name for herself as a writer of feminist science fiction. She was popular among the students because of the interest she showed in just about any subject and any form of writing. While she was ruthless in her criticism of even the best work she reviewed, her frank smile and encouraging summings up made hers the only fully attended non-curricular activity in the college. I don’t know quite what I expected from the society. After all, there’s not a great deal of advice to be offered about the writing of a thirteen-syllable poem beyond “actually, you have fourteen syllables in this one; perhaps if you changed ‘glowing’ to ‘bright’?” I suppose I was seeking some kind of ratification as a writer.

When Sally first took over the society, her idea was that the members should bring to each meeting completed pieces or works in progress. She finished her first meeting by saying:

“so, if you all bring something along next week, we can develop our own way of working.”

Though not long out of university herself, she had already forgotten the rather distant relationship between the British educational system and creative thought. Until someone at the back of the room raised their hand.

“Yes?”

“What about?”

“Excuse me?”

“What shall we write about?”

“Oh. I don’t know... um… how about ‘What I did on my ho1idays’?”
This piece of irony escaped all but a few of the group and in the next meeting, after listening to a short story about incest, the first act of an opera, eight descriptions of Eurorail trips and a rather spirited complaint about being patronised by such a childish task, Sally was forced to take on the issue in a more direct manner. It was eventually agreed that the students themselves would decide upon a loose subject for the next meeting and they could use or ignore it as they wished. The week before my first participation, they’d been listening to music, looking for an inspiring title. There were lots of votes for The Smiths and Billy Bragg but finally they chose ‘I Pity the Poor Immigrant’ from Bob Dylan’s ‘John Wesley Harding’ album.


While I knew I was going to do a haiku, I had some doubts about how I was going to present it. I’d become used to handing out my work on individual sheets and I couldn’t help feeling that photocopies would somehow compromise my artistic integrity. Then it came to me.

___________________________________________________________

I don’t remember much of that session, other than how it ended: I suppose I was a little nervous and was thinking about my coming performance. It wasn’t until I looked at my watch and realised there was only half an hour to go that I paid much attention. I had tuned in in the middle of an argument. Pamela Clutterbuck was demanding to be allowed to dance her version of the song while Sally insisted on the written word.

“You let Derek sing and play the guitar”.

“Yes, but we have the lyrics”.

“What if I write the choreography on the board?”

“Well, perhaps next week…”

“It’s not fair, you fascist!”

This last was punctuated by the slamming of the door and now there were only 20 minutes.

Sally’s smile was accompanied by a shrug. She looked at her watch.
“Well, we have time for one more piece today. How about you, Roger?”
I sat down again with an inward groan.

A smirking Roger began to hand round photocopies. Jesus Christ, there were two whole pages. He started reading and I was shocked to realise that he’d been unfaithful to his vers libre muse. Almost…

“I try to look you in the eye:
I see your history.
I think of how, I think of why
you live in misery.....”


He continued in similar vein for nearly 10 minutes, finishing, at last, to a few encouraging comments but largely to confused silence. It was Sally who solved the problem:

“Well, that’s given us a lot to think about there, hasn’t it? Why don’t we all look at it over the weekend and discuss it at the next session?”

Roger looked as if he might protest. Then he was visibly struck by the possibility of having a whole session to analyse his work.

“Yes, that’s probably best. Does anyone need an extra copy?”

Eight minutes. Sally looked at her watch again, her desperation to escape seeping through the seals around her smile. I stood up quickly.

“Actually, I’ve got a very short piece that won’t even need photocopies.”

“Yeah, come on Tony, let’s hear it.”

Other voices joined in and Sally sighed then shrugged for a second time.

“Ok, then. You’re sure it’s short?”

My answer was to walk to the front of the classroom, announce grandly:

“Haiku: the dilemma”

and throw off my denim jacket.

It was a brand-new, brilliant white t-shirt and I’d carefully written the words in the blackest of ink with the Japanese calligraphy set I’d shoplifted from Harrods:


Your life is shit,
That’s not my fault::
Sorry, anyway.

I realise now that nobody else present had shared the long process that had led to this concentrated form of my deliberations on the drama of immigration, racism and British Liberalism. I thought of this form of writing as a kind of literary dried soup in which a complicated recipe, reduced to a small sachet, would be added to water and would gradually release its subtle flavours to the delighted consumer. As it was, my audience saw only the packaging. Comments ranged from ‘stupid and insensitive’ to ‘stupid and arrogant’. This was bad enough, but when I looked to Sally for support, she wasn’t paying any attention and seemed to be concentrating intensely on something else entirely. Finally she spoke:

“Actually, I think you’ll find a haiku has 17 syl1ables.”

‘I think you’ll find’. Don’t be fooled by that fork-tongued phrase. It may hide behind soft fabrics of doubt, but its intentions are as cold and hard as iron: ‘I know this for a fact. How is it that you do not?’

The meaning of her words spread slowly around the room and gasps of surprise turned into giggles then guffaws. Then Sally began to laugh too and my humiliation was complete. Well, not quite; Roger had that honour:

“Perhaps you’d better start calling them ‘MYkus’!”

I walked towards the door.

“Yes, that’s right, this is yourKU to leave”.

I ran out of the classroom and straight to the library.


Japanese poem
Of seventeen syllables
-Twat.

I ran out of the library and through the gate as news of my political and formulaic errors bounded after me and snapped at my ankles.
I ran to the bus stop, unsure of where I could go yet certain of one thing: my calligraphy set and ‘Mykus’ were going straight into the bin, and I would never write another as long as I lived.

______________________________________________________


Of course, for a twenty-year-old, a bus journey can be a lifetime; especially on a number 23 at rush hour.

I was hugging myself as the bus passed the Boleyn, partly because I didn’t want anyone to see my t-shirt and partly because it was November (I’d been too embarrassed to go back for my jacket). The bus conductor asked to see my pass and I stood up to take it out of my back pocket. As I sat down I heard a voice:

“Oi! Is your t-shirt talking to me?”

Across the aisle I saw two enormous brown eyes framed by jet black wavy hair. I looked around to make sure no-one else was talking to me. Then she spoke again:

“Yeah, it was me. You look surprised.”

“Well, that cockney accent…”

“From a Paki?” she offered.

“Well…”

“Actually, I’m Goan.”

I recovered slightly:

“What, already? Can I come with you?”

She smiled more than laughed but it would do for a start. Especially when the smile came with this:

“Well, we’ll see. Tell me about the t-shirt.”

So that was how I met Maria Cristina Aramita de Freitas. I decided to come clean. The only way to deal with public humiliation is to accept it: confess it to as many people as possible as often as you can so that you, and they, will become bored with the tale. This will soon exorcise it from your dreams and you will also greatly increase your store of dinner party anecdotes, since confession tends to be reciprocated.

As I finished with Roger’s ‘Myku’ joke, I looked up to see we’d passed The Londoner, but I didn’t want to go home in any case: I’d already decided that her stop was near enough for me. We were nearing the end of the Commercial Road when she said she had 15 minutes before her first class and did I want a cup of coffee? Which I did, very much. We had the coffee and then I walked her to the London College of Fashion. She also invited me to her flat to see her designs when her morning classes had finished.

I had always fantasized about meeting a beautiful stranger on the bus and ending up in her bed a few hours later. I still do. The afternoon really was about Maria’s designs and not mine. She was looking for ideas for her final project and especially wanted to attract as much attention to her show as she could. Apart from the degree itself, there was an added incentive: if she received a First and some interest from the fashion industry, her father would invest in whatever business she cared to try.

I would probably have accepted her proposal under any conditions so it was as well that she was an extremely honourable woman. Her idea was to produce Myku bearing t-shirts in order to provoke curiosity. We started with this:

IF YOU CAN'T SAY IT
IN THIRTEEN SYLLABLES
SHUT UP!


on a hundred t-shirts which we distributed among friends.

Later we changed it to:

THE NUMBER OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY
IS THIRTEEN:
MAIKU.

(You’ll have noticed that Maria had changed the spelling to make it more ‘oriental’). Finally, a week before the show, we changed the message to a simple advertisement:

LONDON COLLEGE OF FASHION
THURSDAY NIGHT:
WHAT'S YOURKU?

_____________________________________________________________


This morning I took a taxi to the airport. I’m flying to Japan to a meeting which will formally recognize the Maiku as a kind of little brother to the Haiku. It’s a big relief after six months of negotiation, especially when I think of the death threats I received from a militant arm of the American Haiku Society. We’d just stopped at a traffic light when I saw Roger coming out of Liverpool Street station. He was wearing a Maiku tie with the distinctive M™.

His long hair had disappeared and I could see his scalp under one of those heavily gelled crests: the slaphead of the noughties. I didn’t speak to him, but couldn’t help wondering if he knew how much I owe him.